Espionage Files: Why Tradecraft Will Not Save Intelligence Analysis

The other day I watched a 2 hours special that 48 Hours did back in May titled “The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs” combined with another HBO documentary from 2013 about the CIA and Terrorism called “Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden“.  These two documentaries show the in-depth process of how raw intelligence from the field becomes actionable CT “policy”. I highly recommend you guys watch these to understand how human error, bias and pure political motive can “taint” the intelligence process. The CO needs to really grab hold of Intel Gathering and Dissemination as a skill-set. -SF

Since the failure to disrupt the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the wild overestimate of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, the U.S. intelligence community embarked on a quest to remake analytic doctrine. The focus of this effort addressed concerns about analytic tradecraft, the methods and techniques by which intelligence analysis is produced. Fifteen years on, improving analytic tradecraft became an industry feeding off intelligence services from Washington and Ottawa to Canberra and Bucharest as well as corporations everywhere. However, focusing on analytic tradecraft distracts from the uncomfortable truth that intelligence is not about its producers but rather its users: the ones who rely upon it to make decisions. Kicking the tires of the analytic enterprise is a good thing, but, just as with a car, tires will not help if the problem is the engine. Tires may bound a car’s performance in some basic ways, but they are hardly the most important determinant of how well a car can perform.

Former intelligence officials and scholars of intelligence have long criticized the fixation on organizational reforms whenever intelligence fails, because organizational changes do little to address underlying problems that can derail the intelligence process. Improving analytic tradecraft is much the same. Like structural reforms, analytic tradecraft is internal to an intelligence system. The problem and the solution are manageable without having to go beyond the boundaries of the organization or adopt a different government-wide approach to decision-making. Yet, just because it can be done with minimal fuss does not make it right.

The best analytic tradecraft that neutralized biases, systematized knowledge, and delivered a precise analytic product to decision-makers still cannot save intelligence from decision-makers.. The effort that many all-source intelligence outfits placed on improving analytic tradecraft demonstrates some fundamental misunderstandings of the intelligence process and how decision-makers use intelligence.

First, all-source analysis is not the pinnacle of the intelligence process. Reliable data is. As Sherman Kent wrote, “estimating is what you do when you do not know.” Put another way, analysis is the tool of last resort when efforts to collect the necessary information for decision-making have failed. Regardless of whether analysis sifts signals from noise or connects the dots, analysis attempts to provide by inference what cannot be known directly.

Judgment does not substitute for data. Analysts, by definition, serve in junior positions; they lack responsibility for action. In most countries, analysis is delivered without attribution to the author. Anonymous judgments from junior officials produced by arcane processes probably will not reassure a seasoned policymaker who deals primarily in personal relationships. Policymakers often rise to the positions they are in because they have demonstrated sound judgment and built long-standing relationships with their foreign counterparts. They are incontrovertibly more expert than a junior analyst in their mid-20s. Even if intelligence judgments are overrated, analysts still can help decision-makers find, organize, and appreciate data.

More importantly, intelligence judgments are too ephemeral for potentially costly policy decisions to be made on their basis alone. Policymakers at the top of most intelligence systems have little responsibility and no accountability for the intelligence that reaches them. What they do not control or for which they have no responsibility, they have little incentive in their overworked days to understand. So what are they supposed to think when an anonymous report from an agency without responsibility for policy arrives on their desk seemingly out of nowhere suggesting Iraq is making preparations to invade Kuwait or Iran’s government will collapse?

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

Learning From Terrorist Tactics: Preparing For Subterranean Warfare

I posted an article last year on Subterranean Warfare in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank and it now looks like this nasty type of fighting is definitely going to be part of the landscape in the battle zones in Syria and Iraq as well. -SF

 

Last year, members of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, dug a tunnel leading to the Syrian Air Force Intelligence building in Aleppo and detonated a massive bomb in an attempt to destroy the facility. Reported globally, this event was by no means a rarity in the ongoing Syrian civil war. As Benjamin Runkle warned last year, the United States and its allies must prepare for the subterranean future of warfare. His article was a broad and useful overview of the various threat actors using tunneling to negate the advantages that airpower and other technologies provide to Western militaries. As America increases its military involvement in Iraq and Syria, a more detailed look at the military significance of such structures is warranted. As of February of this year, there were nearly 4,500 U.S. troops in Iraq. Regardless of the merits of further intervening in the conflict, it is a fact that the United States and its allies are sending increasing amounts of troops to the region. Whatever the intentions of American leaders, this expanded presence is almost certain to result in greater contact with a variety of hostile forces. Al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Syrian government, and other factions in the war have all used tunnels to great effect throughout the conflict. U.S. and allied militaries must thus understand and prepare for subterranean warfare.

The Subterranean Landscape in Iraq and Syria

Both Syrian regime and rebel forces have burrowed a vast series of tunnels into the area around Damascus. Given the ever-shifting tide of battle, these structures have become neutral parts of the battlespace, rather than dedicated mobility corridors for one side or the other. Teams of up to 300 insurgents have labored with shovels and pick axes to dig these tunnels. The Free Syrian Army has reportedly even employed architects to design a tunnel, which it used to infiltrate a government military base near the town of Erbin. Outside of the Syrian capital, regime forces claimed they had destroyed a subterranean network near Harasta in June 2015. This massive underground structure includedtunnels up to 200 meters in length equipped with lighting and ventilation ducts. Later that year, ISIL built an elaborate series of passageways in the border town of Sinjar during its battle with Kurdish forces. Likely constructed with jackhammers and hand tools, the network featured multiple exit points fortified with sandbags to protect against American-dropped ordnance. The Islamist group also smashed holes in walls between buildings to allow covered, aboveground transit in the face of withering American airstrikes. As part of ISIL’s tenacious defense of the area south of Mosul, the group has constructed an underground “city within a city” to protect its fighters against advancing Iraqi government troops.

Tunneling in the Offense

The various warring factions in Syria and Iraq have not only used burrowing below ground as a defensive or force protection measure, but they have also used tunnels to deliver troops and explosives against their enemies. When they threatened the Iraqi capital in the late summer of 2014, ISIL made use of Saddam-era subterranean routes to evade Iraqi Security Forces, hide from their aircraft, and deny them rear-area security. In the battle for Homs in November 2015, al-Nusra built passageways 15 meters underground, some of which stretched for 3 kilometers. According to Syrian government soldiers, the primary purpose of these structures was to allow insurgents to encroach on regime fortifications by maneuvering in a covered fashion.

In an almost herculean effort, another rebel group reportedly spent seven months building a tunnel under the Syrian Army’s Wadi Deif base. Instead of using the subterranean passageway to deploy troops, the rebels used it to detonatealmost 60 metric tons of explosives in May 2014 and kill at least 20 soldiers. Possibly following the lead of other groups, ISIL detonated six metric tons of explosives under an Iraqi army headquarters in Ramadi in March of 2015. The insurgents had spent two months digging a 240 meter tunnel under the structure. Syrian regime forces have likewise maneuvered toward rebel checkpoints under the surface to detonate explosives below their unsuspecting targets.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

The Three Faces of Russian Spetsnaz in Syria

As the Russian drawdown from Syria continues, more information continues to emerge about the forces Moscow had committed to shoring up the Assad regime. One telling aspect is how involved Russia’s Spetsnaz special forces were in the deployment. They were involved in two of their three core missions — reconnaissance and special security missions — but not the third, direct combat operations. The implication is that from the outset of the deployment, Moscow planned to minimize its exposure in this messy and bloody war.

As one would expect, there had been Russian special operations forces in Syria even before the formal Russian intervention in September 2015, largely to provide training for their Syrian counterparts and enhanced security for the Russian embassy and other facilities. The Zaslon force of the Foreign Intelligence Service, for example, deployedsome of its men in their usual role of reinforcing regular embassy security.

As Russia began its deployment, Army Spetsnaz were involved in securing the Hmeimim airbase at Latakia and Tartus naval facility, and subsequently in providing some limited reconnaissance to assist in the targeting of airstrikes. The majority of targeting sets came from the Syrians (which may help explain the concentration not on Islamic State but on other rebel groups posing a more immediate threat to the regime), but Spetsnaz appear to have been involved in the fighting on the ground around Aleppo in January and February.

As more Russian forces arrived, so too did more Spetsnaz from GRU (military intelligence). At the peak of the deployment, there was an otryad (detachment, the Spetsnaz equivalent of a battalion) of 230-250 men, probably drawn from several units, including Naval Spetsnaz from the 431^st Naval Reconnaissance Point (or brigade). There was also a team of operators from the newly formed Special Operations Command (KSO), mainly snipers (or rather counter-snipers) and scouts. Indeed, the Conflict Intelligence Team, a civilian group that investigates Russian operations abroad, uncovered the first death of a KSO operator in Syria: Captain Fedor Zhuravlev, whose death in November 2015 was eventually confirmed this March.

In Syria, the Spetsnaz appear to have engaged in or been prepared for two of their three primary missions. The core mission is battlefield reconnaissance, which in Syria especially involved guiding Russian artillery fires and air strikes.

The second mission is carrying out special security missions. From Zenit to the KSO, they were conducting force protection missions in an environment where the threat from terrorism was as great as conventional attack. Spetsnaz may have already been in Damascus as a contingency in the event of the regime collapsing. This would not be too surprising, as Zaslon is believed to have been tasked with “clean up” in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, removing documents or other materials Moscow did not want falling into U.S. hands. In other words, this would not be a new mission for the unit, if this is true.

However, the Spetsnaz as a whole are a very substantial corps, most not trained to the level one might expect in the West from “special forces.” Indeed, although now a minority, there are even conscripts in their ranks. While units such as the KSO are undoubtedly Tier One operators, in many ways the Spetsnaz are best thought of as expeditionary troops, well-trained light infantry a distinct cut above the regular Russian military, but nonetheless essentially deployed not in squads and platoons but battalions.

However, in a conversation before the drawdown was announced, one current officer made the point to me that “this is the kind of war for which the Spetsnaz have been training for thirty years” — he was referring to the Soviet experiences in Afghanistan, which very much set the tone for them. He continued, “if we wanted to fight the war [in Syria], we’d be using Spetsnaz.”

That they didn’t — that there was no willingness to deploy Spetsnaz in the kind of “tip of the spear” assault and interdiction missions for which they train — demonstrates that from the first Moscow had no intention of being sucked into the heart of the ground fighting. There was slight mission creep as T-90 tanks deployed to secure Latakia were used to spearhead some attacks, and the introduction of long-range 152mm MSTA-B howitzers necessitated more security units, too. However, the Spetsnaz were kept to a relative handful and focused on their reconnaissance and security missions.

There are still some Spetsnaz reconnaissance forces on the ground, and Russian press sources have spoken of more than 60 GRU and military advisors. However, Moscow seems to be looking to de-escalate its role in Syria, and the third face of the Spetsnaz, that of assault troops, is unlikely to be turned to be Middle East for the moment — at least if the Russians can help it.

Read the Original Article at War on the Rocks

The Long History of “Little Green Men” Tactics and How They Were Defeated

In both Crimea and the subsequent fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine, Russia’s signature tactic has been the use of so-called “Green Men,” soldiers without identifying insignia whose identity as Russian soldiers the Kremlin denied. Ukraine, Georgia, and even NATO members like Estonia now fear that they could be the next target for Russia’s Green Men.  NATO, alarmed by the need to prepare for this unexpected tactic, has committed to develop new countermeasures to defend against this threat. Green Men, or deniable forces, are a central part of what has come to be called “hybrid warfare” in the “gray zone” between war and peace.  All of this seems to be a new and innovative departure from traditional tactics, perhaps even a new model for conflict in the 21^st century.

However, deniable forces are nothing new. Nor, in fact, is the specific phenomenon of using them to seize a piece of territory, as Russia did in Crimea. There is a long history of hybrid warfare in general and of intervening with deniable forces in particular. This history points not just to the enduring nature of the threat, but also to the contours of a “counter-hybrid” strategy to defeat it.

In the course of a broader research project for which I compiled data on every land grab since 1918, 105 land grabs in total, I found three instances before Crimea of deniable forces seizing territory. In 1999, Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control in the Kargil region of Kashmir, occupying positions overlooking strategically important roads in Indian territory. Like the Russians, Pakistan used deniable forces that they described as Kashmiri insurgents. Unlike the Ukrainians, the Indians counterattacked, absorbing heavy casualties to expel the Pakistanis.

 Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks